


More Than a Woman: The Memoir of an Aging Newshound

by Bittah_Wizard



Category: Original Work
Genre: A Grotesque Amount of Literary References, Activism, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cold War, F/M, Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Memoirs, Original Fiction, Physical Abuse, Vignettes, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 04:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17359154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bittah_Wizard/pseuds/Bittah_Wizard
Summary: A series of vignettes taken from the autobiography of a journalist growing up during the Cold War.





	More Than a Woman: The Memoir of an Aging Newshound

**Author's Note:**

> This bad boy is chalk full of references. Find your inner Ash Ketchum and attempt to catch them all! A list of this fic's references can be found in the End Notes.

 

_For Helena._

 

* * *

 

 

_The Introduction_

_2018_

I had always held a sort of contempt, a degree of derision for people who write autobiographies. The hubris behind such an endeavor seemed distasteful. I have come to realize that I was a bit too harsh in my youth. Now that both my memories and my hair have faded, I believe that the only way of remembering the best years of my life is to put them to paper. It is important that I can return to the best bits, that I can recall all of my important “firsts.” Being able to return to these moments is more comforting than I can describe; having a collection of tangible memories of my family, of my friends, and of what I have experienced is the greatest of gifts.

That being said, I must now warn of the content ahead. This memoir is not sickly-sweet or self-serving. I am not a romantic thinking these pages my confessional and striving to portray "simply myself." This collection is much more than some attempt to justify myself to the masses. No, this memoir is meant to reflect on the peoples, places, and things that have greatly influenced my formative years.

 

* * *

  

_The Importance of Sliced Bread_

_1935-1940_

I was born on November 7, 1935 in a small town in Illinois. Michael, the area in which I grew up, is so small that the government, in good conscience, cannot call it a “town.” Rather, the acres of rolling hills and flat farmland that I call home is referred to as an “unincorporated area.” I was born the second daughter to Harold and Helena Roth, a wedded pair of teenaged Catholics. Such labels were quite important. Young. Catholic. Farmers. Yes, we were all of these things, but the most significant was that we were land-rich. My father owned approximately 250 acres of rich Illinois farmland; however, while we were considered land-rich, we were also quite dirt-poor. The wordplay is all rather ironic, in hindsight.

My father worked the land tirelessly and my mother baked pastries for local restaurants; neither of their jobs kept us above the government’s poverty line. My very first memory is of being quite aware of our financial situation. I remember me and my sister Sarah helping my mother in the kitchen. We were each assigned pots to stir, so for hours we were perched up on that narrow counter slowly mixing together fruit, sugar, and SURE-JELL. We canned everything from cow to carrots, and on that day, we were making jellies.

I remember our tiny television broadcasting _The Three Stooges_ ; I can still hear Moe giving his “Moronika for Morons!” speech. Not even the slaps and smacks from the miniscule-mustachioed Moe to Curly’s bald head could help my rising tantrum. The heat that had accumulated after hours of constant cooking flushed my five-year-old cheeks and made me start to cry.

I was tired. I wanted to quit.

My mom paused in her melting of Gulf Wax to pick me up and set me down in her lap. She dragged over a half-filled jar of jam and then she looked at me. She told me, in the quiet way a mother does to her softly crying child, that when she was young her family baked constantly. They, too, were poor, and so they had to make everything from scratch. I remember the crinkling of the paper bag as she placed the sliced bread next to the jam. She called it “baker’s bread” and said that it was her saving grace. She explained to us how the invention of sliced bread, to her, was a symbol of something greater; it was a promise of a life without kneading, without needing. She slathered a slice of the bread with our jam and offered me a bite. I remember being grateful my fingers were not covered in flour, as my mother’s aching hands had been.

I took a bite.

 

* * *

  

_The USS Tomich DE 242_

_1940-1946_

The first thing that I remember about my father is that he was always gone. Up until I was eight years old, he was absent because he worked the farm from before sunrise to after sunset. His absence was never significant because he was always a holler away. That changed in July of 1943 when he left to join the Allies in their fight against Hitler.

Funnily enough, it was also 1943 when the U. S. government placed a ban on sliced bread as a means of wartime conservation.

When he left, I cried for four days. His absence felt worse not because of the distance, but because it felt permanent. In my mind, he was neither alive nor dead—he was a sort of Schrodinger’s cat dressed in Navy Blues.

Every night my mother would tuck Sarah and I into our shared bed and we would ask when dad was coming home. In answer, she always looked away. She would then break out her battered copy of random poems. My mother had dropped out of school by the time she was fourteen, but she always encouraged us to read “the greats.” My mother was a romantic. I remember one night, about a year after father had left, she was reading to us before we fell asleep. She was raising and lowering the cadence of her voice to match the poem's strange syntax, when she choked over the line, “The Cavalry of Woe— / Who win, and nations do not see….” That was the night she finally told us he would be coming home soon.

It was February of 1946 when my father was discharged from the Navy. By the time he traveled home from the Yellow Sea, he had sailed 140,000 miles.

By the time he had traveled home, he was a different man.

Those miles changed him.

He could no longer stand the sight of rice, and he always found enough money to buy a bottle of booze.

 

* * *

 

_Miss Marple & Me_

_1946-1955_

My brother Patrick was born in May of 1948.

That same year my mother drove us all 30 miles to Jerseyville, the closest town with a small book shop. It was packed with used books, and I quickly fell in love. I left the shop with a single treasure: a battered Agatha Christie novel. I read it in two days. In between chores, before and after (and sometimes _during_ ) school—I was always devouring the mystery surrounding the death of Colonel Lucius Protheroe. The old spinster Miss Marple navigated her way through false leads and an abundance of shady suspects. It had a strong female writer and a deceptively cunning female protagonist. That was the beginning of my love affair with the written word.

My sister dropped out of school when she turned sixteen. It was 1950 and she was pregnant with Jimmy Fisher’s kid. They were married on a Monday. I remember having a test in algebra the next day.

My father hit my mother for the first time in front of me in 1951. He was drunk. She fell and hit her head on the stove. I ran out the back door.

Three days later my mother drove us all to the same book store. I remember staring at the purpling bump on her forehead. I kept trying to remember if she had had something similar three years earlier, the first time we had made the journey into Jerseyville. I couldn't be sure, and that made my stomach sour further. I held my brother’s hand as we browsed the cramped shelves of Jay’s Books. I wandered aimlessly and picked a small, blue hardback at random. My mother gave me a tired smile while the clerk rang up our purchases.

That night I lost myself in the mystery of a Mexican stone tablet and three mysterious keys. I made the story last two weeks; I didn't want to put it down. Nancy Drew slowly became a character I could slip into, a character I could pretend to be.

It became commonplace for my father to hurt my mother. It became another label to describe us. We were still Catholic farmers with just enough dirt to be considered dirt-poor; we simply became a few new things. Unsure. Unhappy. Broken.

I was the first person to graduate from high school in our family in the year of 1952. My mother cried, and my father gave me a hug that I felt for hours afterward. The night of my graduation, I climbed up to the peak of the hill behind our house. I stayed up there until the sun rose and I could hear our rooster wake. I remember floating into the kitchen, dazed and unsure about what was supposed to come next. My mother, already sitting at the table with a piece of toast, got up and made me a cup of tea. I recall that as we sat, she pet my hair and gave me an ultimatum. She told me that I could either get a job or go to college, but that either way she wanted me out of the house. I was heartbroken, thinking my mom didn't need me any longer. Her eyes, though, were shining with hope. As she left me to deliberate, she gave me a wrapped package. I opened it to find a copy of _The Second Sex_ , a copy much nicer than the tattered text I already owned.

I knew then that she wanted me to live for myself, to become more than the stereotypical Woman.

I left on a Tuesday. I called her every week.

At the age of seventeen, I left Michael, Illinois to pursue an education in journalism at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (as a personal hero of mine had done almost 20 years earlier). During my time there, I had many more new firsts. I moved on from my love of mysteries and developed a fascination with great sagas. I traveled through Middle-earth with Frodo and friends, learning along the way that the most significant of changes can come from the smallest of people. 

It was also during my days at university that I met a person, for the very first time, with skin much darker than mine.

 

* * *

  

_Right(s) Now!_

_1955-1957_

Susannah Mae was a young, peaceful demonstrator that picketed outside Bryn Mawr. She introduced me to her cause; and once I began to truly see the power disparity between white and black people in the United States, I could not look away. I was converted to the belief that the, “…problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line…” and I became aware of a whole genre of fiction that I had yet to read.

Black authors and authors who wrote about black characters were largely unknown to me. So, I just dove into the literary worlds of characters like jazz musician Lynn Hope, who played in cool clubs and got beaten up by the cops just outside of said clubs. 

I became a member of Yoknapatawpha County and watched as the manipulative Ned McCaslin fixed a horse race. 

I got angry when Bigger Thomas became every black stereotype; I got even angrier when the justice system treated Bessie’s fate so callously. 

I remember crying when I reached the final pages of Lutie Johnson’s story. I wanted her to survive Boots, Junto, and Jones; but, in the end, she could not both survive and do what was best for her son. 

It was after reading all of these stories that I decided to use my degree to help, if only in some small capacity, change the world.

 

* * *

 

_(My Personal) Books-to-Movies Adaptation_

_1957-1964_

The first time I fell in love was in the year of 1962. It was a Friday evening and I had decided to go on a date with the photographer that shared a small workspace with me at _The Atlantic_. Up until this point in time, I was not a movie-goer. My penny-pinching upbringing caused me to see it as a waste of future book purchases. That all changed with Charles Pilgrim. Charlie was an easygoing New Yorker with a love of pictures, both in motion and static.

Our first date was to see _The Manchurian Candidate_ in the theater. It was the first time I had ever seen the “big screen.” It was also the first time that I was introduced to the art behind filmmaking. 

Together we watched a science fiction miracle called _The Twilight Zone_ , and I remember covering my face in fascinated horror when I saw a man time travel back to his idyllic childhood town and slowly break down. 

He also introduced me to Saturday morning cartoons; the one I liked most was about a young boy who went on adventures around the world with a diverse cast of characters. I tried to lure him into the literary world with satirical novels; books filled with damaged protagonists, dark humor, and circular logic. Television and film became our steady Friday night date. Books were a little more few and far between.

I asked him to marry me after four months. He said yes. Maybe I am a romantic after all.

 

* * *

 

_More_

_1964-1965_

A few months after Charlie and I were engaged, I brought him home to meet my family. The air was tense all throughout dinner, but I was determined to make a point that staying away for a decade failed to do. After dinner, I picked up the nearly empty bottle of scotch from the top of the icebox and I followed my father out onto the porch. I caught Patrick’s shadowed eyes as I passed, and I remember time slowing down.

I threw the bottle onto the concrete in front of my father’s dirty work boots. He shouted at me. I screamed at him. Then I told him that if he ever wanted to see his future grandchildren that he would sober up. If he refused, I told him that this would be the last time we ever spoke. My father began to weep; and, in that moment, we were no longer broken. We became something greater, something stronger, something more.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have enough references in this story to fulfill the wet dream of any English/History/Pop culture buff. Such references, ordered sequentially, include: 
> 
> The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau  
> The Three Stooges  
> "To fight aloud, is very brave," Emily Dickinson  
> The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie  
> The Clue of the Black Keys, Carolyn Keene  
> The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir  
> The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien  
> The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois  
> "The Screamers," Leroi Jones a.k.a. Amiri Baraka  
> The Reivers, William Faulkner  
> Native Son, Richard Wright  
> The Street, Ann Petry  
> The Manchurian Candidate  
> The Twilight Zone  
> Jonny Quest  
> Catch-22, Joseph Heller
> 
> Comments, Critiques, & Kudos are all appreciated!


End file.
